Contract to provide major boost to NZ search and rescue

Trans-Tasman contract to provide major boost to NZ search
and rescue capability

Maritime New Zealand (MNZ) and the
Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) have signed a
contract that will provide a major boost to search and
rescue (SAR) in the region.

The contract with McMurdo
Group’s Techno-Sciences Inc. will improve the way
emergency distress beacon signals are picked up and passed
on to rescue authorities.

Two new satellite receiving
stations will be built, one near Taupo and the other in
Western Australia, along with a new mission control centre
in Canberra, to pick up signals from medium-Earth orbit
search and rescue (MEOSAR) satellites.

MEOSAR satellites
(orbiting at around 20,000km above the Earth) are replacing
the current low-Earth orbit (LEOSAR) satellites (orbiting
between 800-1000km), which are being phased out over the
next four years.

Existing beacons, of which there are
46,000 registered in New Zealand, will not be affected by
the change.

Six satellite dishes will be built at New
Zealand site, located mid-way between Taupo and Rotorua,
with construction scheduled to be completed by the end of
2015. The receiving station is expected to be commissioned
towards the end of 2016 and operational by 2017.

The New
Zealand contract is made up of $7.2m for construction of the
receiving station and $5.5m in operating costs over the next
11 years.

There are currently 16 MEOSAR satellites
orbiting Earth, compared to five LEOSAR satellites, meaning
beacon signals will be received more quickly and beacon
locations identified with greater accuracy. This will
further improve over the next five years as the number of
MEOSAR satellites is expected to increase to more than 50,
ensuring several satellites will be in view at all times
from anywhere on Earth.

As with the LEOSAR system, beacon
signals will pass through the MEOSAR satellites to the two
ground stations, be processed through the Canberra mission
control centre, and relayed to the Rescue Coordination
Centre New Zealand (RCCNZ), thus triggering SAR
operations.

The RCCNZ, part of MNZ, responds to around 550
beacon alerts each year.

“The joint investment by New
Zealand and Australia in the MEOSAR project is another
example of the close cooperation between our two countries
in what is a vital area of operations,” MNZ Director Keith
Manch said.

“The change is necessary because without a
medium earth orbiting receiving station New Zealand would
effectively lose its ability to respond to distress beacons
once the LEOSAR satellites are phased out. But the change
brings with it significant improvements to search and rescue
capability.”

AMSA Chief Executive Officer Mick Kinley
said Australia and New Zealand’s ground stations would
work cooperatively to achieve overlapping coverage of the
two countries’ search and rescue regions.

“This offers
a high degree of resilience in the event of a system outage
that would be expensive for either country to achieve
alone,” Mr Kinley said. “AMSA is pleased to continue
this collaborative regional approach with New
Zealand.”

New Zealand’s search and rescue region
extends from just below the Equator to the South Pole, half
way across the Tasman, and east to half way to South
America.

BackgroundThe global search and rescue
satellite system is managed by the International
Cospas-Sarsat organisation.

A consortium of Russia, the
United States, Canada and France formed the organisation in
1982. Since then 41 participants – including New Zealand
– have joined to provide satellite tracking
equipment.

The current global
search and rescue satellite system makes use of two types of
satellite - LEOSAR satellites and geostationary, or GEO,
satellites, that are stationary above the equator. Because
of New Zealand’s distance from the equator, the GEO
satellites are low on the horizon, which can limit their
line-of-sight visibility, particularly in mountainous
terrain. That makes LEO satellites important, but these are
limited in number and not always over New Zealand, so there
can be delays between a beacon activation and its detection
by a LEO
satellite.

Prime Minister John Key says it is “not the government’s preferred option” to make a fresh capital injection into the troubled state-owned coal miner, Solid Energy, but dodged journalists’ questions at his weekly press conference on whether that might prove necessary... More>>

NZCU Baywide says that once it was found to have committed a breach of a former staff member’s privacy, it had attempted to resolve the matter... the censure and remedies for its actions taken almost three years ago are “severe” but accepted, and will hopefully draw a line under the matter. More>>

PayPal has ceased processing payments for Mega, the file storage and encryption firm looking to join the New Zealand stock market via a reverse listing of TRS Investments, amid claims it is not a legitimate cloud storage service. More>>

The New Zealand government's operating deficit was smaller than expected in the first six months of the financial year, as the consumption and corporate tax take rose ahead of forecast in December, having lagged estimates in previous months. More>>